Familypedia talk:Classification conventions (geographic names)
Excellent work so far! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:14, 18 July 2009 (UTC) Unitary authorities New Zealand is not alone in having authorities that act at two levels. Gisborne, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman district or city councils are definitely elected as territorial authorities in the same way (with Mayors, for example) as the other 50 or so, but they are also regional councils in all respects where a regional council is required. The project page should state which level(s) Familypedia should give such authorities. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:14, 18 July 2009 (UTC) :Fortunately all of this sort of information is well documented in Wikipedia, and all familypedia has to do is reference WP as the authority for what is and is not a second level administrative level in a country. You may have seen prior to your edit that Camborne, New Zealand has Porirua is referenced as both a locality and a "county". Perhaps you would like to further document New Zealand, citing en:wikipedia for what its articles considers a second level administrative levels there. I think I got the Porirua case right- if not perhaps you can straighten it out. :The crucial point of the system is that any guidances stated in the classification convention is based on not on what we think is a second administrative subdivision, or what we think is the largest entity classified as a municipality for a given location, or which countries we think are independent and sovereign, but what en:WP says. 08:48, 18 July 2009 (UTC) ::Even now, 8 years later, Wikipedia still does NOT have consistent documentation of these matters. Unitary authorities are still categorized as first level but also indicated as second-level because of the inclusion of their article (not their category!) under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Second-level_administrative_country_subdivisions. Evidently we can show them as subdiv-1 and have nothing (except wards maybe?) in the county field. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:29, July 26, 2017 (UTC) Split counties Where an old county or other unit that has now been split is the only known location of an event, people will be unable to specify the current entity. Is that a case for using "other"? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:14, 18 July 2009 (UTC) :Right- county means current county, locality means current locality. Nation means current nation. If we think there might be any contributor confusion on this, the forms can make it absolutely explicit. So if we have a birth in one of the historic counties of Wales, a contributor is advised to use this name in the places-other field along with any other archaic terms for the village or place name that might be used by another visitor to identify an event location. Bots will forcibly evict historic values from the main location properties and banish them to the places-other property. We need to be exceptionally consistent on this point or there will be confusion amongst users. We all tend to learn by example, not by reading these documentation. As important as their exclusion is from the current location fields, they need to be included in the places-other property whenever it is known to the contributor. :I would love for there to be more formal properties- like historic entities and we can and should add them in the future when we have more editor eyes looking at them, and we understand which will be most popular. The main benefit ist that it is easier to create reports with these values in their own column if they have their own property. While it is technically possible to generate reports with these names from the places-other field, it is a task for expert users. It is difficult to support large numbers of properties without lots more editors, so perhaps we 09:23, 18 July 2009 (UTC) 2016 update Some of the project page seems to be out of date, and most of the page is seldom if ever referred to. We recently changed the street and address relationship without changing what's here, for example. Another example is that most of us put the lowest level of locality (above mere buildings or farms) in the Locality field even if there's a city, LGA, or other 3rd-level entity above it, and we create subpages for them. I think Phlox was over-optimistic in thinking that we would soon organize these fields in a strict hierarchical manner. Maybe one day... -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:40, June 2, 2016 (UTC)